A Framework for Annotating Information Structure in Discourse

What it is about

The paper proposes a framework for analysing information structure in conversational English, using the Switchboard corpus. It has two layers. The first is information status (old, mediated or new), which tells whether an entity is accessible to the listener. The second is information structure proper: theme/rheme, which says how each intonation phrase is organised, and kontrast, which marks how salient the speaker wants an entity to be. The authors argue that information structure in English can be analysed only together with prosodic prominence and phrasing. They therefore propose annotating a subset of the corpus for prosody, in stand-off XML in the NXT tool, so that the layers stay independent of the surface syntax. As a demonstration, they annotate 14 noun phrases of one "Pie in the Sky" sentence group, and they show how the theme/rheme split and the prosodic phrase boundaries differ.

Ideas

• I1. Keep information status as a stand-off table keyed by token ids, separate from the parse, as the paper does. Mova's UD trees stay unchanged, and each status label carries the rule that set it.
• I2. Write a decision list for the mediated sub-categories, following the paper's decision tree (for example, a mediated NP with a general sense versus one linked to a situation). Test it on the 14 example NPs first, then on a larger hand-labelled set.
• I3. Derive a first theme/rheme guess from the UD tree: the subject and the words linked to earlier discourse form the theme, and the rest is the rheme. Measure the guess on the paper's example before using it elsewhere.
• I4. Do not claim prosodic results. Without audio, the paper's most important claim cannot be tested in Mova, so mark it as a limit.

For Mova

The chapters are 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure and 30. Pragmatics and discourse: overview. The code is prag/src/frames.rs for the discourse status and en/src/lin.rs for word order. The measure is agreement of the rule-based status and theme/rheme labels with a hand-labelled set, and the size of that set is itself a limit to report.

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.3115/1608829.1608836

@inproceedings{calhoun2005framework,
  title = {{A Framework for Annotating Information Structure in Discourse}},
  author = {Calhoun, Sasha and Nissim, Malvina and Steedman, Mark and Brenier, Jason},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotations II: Pie in the Sky},
  year = {2005},
  doi = {10.3115/1608829.1608836},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1608829.1608836}
}

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